Why don't we have more DPS abilities ?

[Raikai]

MP is ultimately just a shared cooldown system.

Consider for instance if we had no spammable heals, just the CDs. Tuned accordingly (and likely with a much smaller range between max and min ilvl for the comment) every heal would matter such that you have to be careful and deliberate with your resources. Now, consider if we had no healing CDs, only MP costs across or otherwise spammable heals, and were tuned accordingly. Again, we'd have to be deliberate with our AoEs and Cure IIs.

It's less an issue by which GCD heals should give mana and oGCDs should spend it as simply that there isn't enough damage to go around for both, let alone for the capped-per-minute-healing of oGCDs to be leveraged uniquely for burst rather than general healing. Giving an MP cost to oGCDs commensurate to their burst would go some way to making some loss of offensive uptime unavoidable and therefore allowing individual attacks to be tuned higher, but the biggest problem is ultimately just that there isn't enough damage to interact with our spammable heals that often, simply because doing so sacrifices damage unnecessarily, even if we removed all MP costs.

Indeed, but I feel that's right that we can't think about changing healer paradigm without changing the encounter damage profile.

If they didn't do this in the "expansion that would focus on improving encounters", I don't have faith they will in 8.0. In fact, it's baffling that - in a game with combat being so formulaic - they don't consider encounter design AND job design two things that must be improved upon simultaneously.

[Reginald_Cain]

We don't have more damage buttons or things to heal because square Enix hates healers and physical ranged and want both roles to die.